By Drew Minard

Lady Gaga’s 2020 conceptual dance-pop album Chromatica crash-landed on Earth at exactly the right time. After numerous delays, the album was eventually released deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and even if it happened to be released during a less chaotic time in history, anyone ever feeling afraid or at a loss of a sense of identity would be able to connect with Chromatica and its deeply human themes. Chromatica is rich with juxtaposing elements of fashion and human virtue that reflect Gaga’s keen ability to engage and interact with her audience on a personal and human level. Vignettes of the album’s artwork include stilettos with knives emerging from their soles, making them beautifully unwalkable, and an image depicting Gaga as a humanoid trapped in a glass box, submerging herself into a pond of (what you’d assume to be), her own blood. These highly exaggerated and opposing depictions of fashion and self-introspection affirm yet also challenge previous definitions of camp and the power that camp can have on its audiences. Combining the celebratory and extravagant nature of pop and electronic music with rich and deeply emotional lyrics addressing her own mental health and experience with PTSD, Gaga takes on a unique camp perspective. In Chromatica, Gaga pushes past the limits that previous definitions of camp have established and lets it evolve into something more, requiring a serious personal conversation between audience and subject.

Frederik Heyman for PAPER

Sontag, Dyer, Robertson and McMillan have provided interpretations of camp that seem to disagree on the answer to the question, “What is camp?” The key points of divergence include whether camp can be intentional, serious or engaged, and to which group it belongs. However, we can also interpret the disagreement between these authors as evidence of an evolution of camp itself, and that Chromatica follows a natural progression in this evolving definition of what camp is, what it does, and who it serves. 

According to Sontag, camp is a taste and a sensibility. “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion… taste in acts, taste in morality” (Sontag 1). However, the taste and sensibility that Sontag defines as “pure camp” is never intentional. She writes, “Pure camp is always naive… The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious” (Sontag 1). Sontag sees camp as a result of failed seriousness, whereas Gaga sees the potential of seriousness as a result of camp. In Chromatica, Gaga encourages her audience to first witness the extravagance and exaggeration often found within the world of pop and dance music to then use these camp aesthetics to access more serious and painful aspects of their own lives. 

Halfway through the album, after a sweeping and cinematic orchestral arrangement entitled Chromatica II, we are abruptly thrust into 911, Gaga’s spiritual ode to antipsychotics and the numbness that they often cause her to feel. She monotonically raps, “Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes, save them ‘til I know I’m gon’ drop this front I’ve built around me, oasis, paradise is in my hand.” Through the campy analogy of pills in bottles to dolls in boxes, Gaga juxtaposes camp with life-saving medication and asks her audience to confront their pain as well as the tools they may use to confront it. Sontag writes, “It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized…” (2), but I argue that in Chromatica, Gaga proves that definitions of camp are constantly in a state of evolution and that engagement can be an important function in works of camp art.

Dyer agrees with many of the aesthetic qualities of camp outlined by Sontag, but he diverges with her on whether camp serves a serious purpose. While, according to Dyer, camp can be a meaningful refuge for gay men, precisely because it is a non-serious space, that lack of seriousness can be detrimental. Camp is an important cultural space and in order for culture to thrive, seriousness must, at times, be present. However, camp isn’t serious, and can be a distraction from that which is. “[Camp] tends to lead to an attitude that you can’t take anything seriously, everything has to be turned into a witticism or a joke. Sexism and our own male chauvinism are hard to understand, come to terms with, change. That does not always lend itself to fun and wit, but it needs to be done all the same” (Dyer 50). Sontag, Dyer, Robertson, and McMillan all agree that camp is ambiguous and difficult to define, however, evolving definitions of camp prove that with the audiences it is now reaching progressively more in the mainstream, camp needs to be an outlet for more serious topics and issues. “Camping about then is good and bad, progressive and reactionary” (Dyer 50). The reaction that Chromatica elicits from its audience is one of acknowledging ones darkness and then attempting to eliminate the deep and long-standing fear of that darkness. 

Not only in the lyrical content of the album is this dark exploration present, but Gaga fans were also given the opportunity to discover their own emotional and personal coming-to-terms in a more tactile way during the 2022 summer run of The Chromatica Ball, Gaga’s international stadium tour supporting the album nearly two years after its release. In Gaga’s own words, the tour’s overarching concept and layout were inspired by minimalist architecture in order to encourage personal reflection from her audiences around the globe: “The stage was inspired by brutalist architecture, materials, textures, crudity, and transparency. A real savage and hard look at yourself and what you’ve been through.” Whilst traditional pop tours generally include flashy projections and vibrantly costumed background dancers, The Chromatica Ball flipped that on its head in what Guardian reviewer Michael Cragg called a “dark treatise on failing mental health set to bubbling house and performed in bloodied PVC” (2). This innovative and impassioned approach to camp spectacle that Cragg describes is seen throughout The Chromatica Ball. The visuals displayed on large screens throughout the show were dark and meticulous and represented a journey toward healing and toward the celebration of one’s self through art. One interlude projected during the third act of the show summates the pathos of Chromatica, in which Gaga states, in the tone of a Shakespearean sonnet, “If fantasy could surely make a friend, the palette of your dreams would draw them mad…while some still search for color never had, this life is only art on life’s support.” Through the juxtaposition of Shakespearean drama with Gaga’s signature high glamour, this interlude encapsulates Chromatica’s mission statement of discovering one’s truest self and contacting personal fears and darknesses through the celebratory arts of dance and music. Another example of interactive camp spectacle in The Chromatica Ball is through Gaga’s use of her dancers. Instead of only providing background entertainment and quick costume change assistance for Gaga, the dancers in the show, adorned in grey jumpsuits and executing Martha Graham-esque modern dance movements, were an abstract mirroring of Gaga’s inner demons, her trusted spiritual guides, and reflections of her inner and most vulnerable self. Throughout the show, they aid, taunt, guide, and challenge Gaga, just as any critical inner voice would do. Gaga deviates from the norms of pop music as she employs these abstract versions of camp aesthetics to highlight personal topics and issues that she sees as helpful and crucial for audiences to take in. The show was a spectacle of intense human emotion and discovery that affirms Dyer’s perspective on seriousness within camp. The Chromatica Ball challenged audiences and gave them a chance to use a traditionally digestible and easygoing nightlife experience to look inward. Anyone present in the crowd of The Chromatica Ball struggling with their own mental health would feel encouraged to continue their fight. 

Further in his definition of camp, Dyer is also pointed about to whom camp belongs. “It is just about the only style, language and culture that is distinctively and unambiguously gay male” (Dyer 49). This last point of his, for whom the camp bell tolls, is the point of embarkation for Robertson’s argument about a definition of camp that is more expansive and inclusive of groups marginalized on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. 

According to Robertson, camp is a queer discourse, not in the conventional sexual or cultural sense, but in the sense that it refers to a “variety of discourses that have grown up in opposition to or at variance with the dominant, straight, symbolic order” (Robertson 271). Camp has always been for anyone who finds themselves outside of normative societal roles and this can connect us to Robertson’s definition of who it serves. “It enables not only gay men, but also heterosexual and lesbian women, and perhaps heterosexual men, to express their discomfort with and alienation from the normative gender and sex roles assigned to them by straight culture” (Robertson 271). Chromatica merely extends the definition of queer to include those who are alienated by mental illness or non-conforming mental health. Opposing Sontag’s apolitical stance on camp, Robertson claims, “We can, however, reclaim camp as a political tool” (Robertson 268). Camp has the ability to change the world living outside of it when it finds the correct balance of seriousness and frivolity. Chromatica politicizes camp when it brings mental health to the center of the discourse by mirroring it with something as comforting and celebratory as pop and dance music. 

Robertson’s claim that camp can be used by socially rejected people to embrace their lost or forgotten identities is affirmed by McMillan in his definition of camp as well as continuing Gaga’s conversation on camp’s evolution. For McMillan’s “Nicki-aesthetics,” camp is a bulwark for the establishment of an identity. He defines camp as a “method of resolving self-contempt and reclaiming pride in denigrated identities,” whose “deliberate  off-ness and self-conscious theatricality… extends past the proscenium arch… transforming the textures of everyday life into objects for its devastating play…” (McMillan 81). Camp is a theatrical practice which serves those who have been denied a solid sense of identity due to societal rejections and who want to break out from and be freed of them. Chromatica is a metaphor of life and identity as theater and Gaga finds her sense of identity by adopting Sontag’s camp idea of “being-as-playing-a-role.” Similar to Nicki Minaj’s use of parody and performance that McMillan addresses, Gaga distances herself from her own trauma in what McMillan would call a  “…play between subject and object in which the female spectator laughs at and plays with her own image… distancing herself from her own image by making fun of, and out of that image” (McMillan 82). In a more dramatic and serious way throughout Chromatica, Gaga proudly takes on the role of survivor who has lived to tell their story and who is there to encourage others to do the same. The first lyric of Chromatica poses a crucial question: “Could you pull me out of this alive?” Then, the last lyric of the album ends on an element of triumph: “Battle for your life.” The self-distanciation that Gaga adopts throughout Chromatica and through her journey coming to terms with the affects of her mental illness allows for the audience to come to terms with themselves using newly formed tools of camp. The journey that Chromatica takes the audience through evolves and expands the limits to what camp can do and how it can change the people it serves. 

Cecilio Castrillo Martinez, Gary Fay, and Gasoline Glamour for Chromatica

Sontag refers to great works of art of the 20th century in that their “goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent and unresolvable subject matter” (Sontag 9). Chromatica shows Gaga being less concerned about making pop music that is necessarily pleasing or easy to listen to, but which reflects on what it means to be human and where, as Sontag puts it, “another valid sensibility is being revealed” (Sontag 9). Gaga revolutionizes definitions of camp by tackling a subject matter that is rarely seen in the ambient and blissful world of house and dance music and reaches out to those rejected identities who camp is specifically catered toward. 

Camp and its effects on human culture will continue to evolve and there is no way to know to what extent. How deeply personal or serious can something previously seen as so frivolous be able to expand towards? In her rich and emotional disquisition on mental health, Gaga has a fearlessness in her efforts to emotionally engage her audience through a camp aesthetic. Camp will only continue to evolve if, like Gaga, it persists in demanding a personal interaction from its audience and their search for seriousness in its frivolity.

Works Cited

Cragg, Michael. Review of Lady Gaga: The Chromatica Ball – a spectacular show of high camp and insect cosplay, Guardian, 22 July 2022.

Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. Routledge, 18 Aug. 2005, pp. 49-62

Gaga, Lady. Chromatica. Streamline, 29 May, 2020

McMillan, Uri. “Nicki-Aesthetics: The Camp Performance of Nicki Minaj.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 24, no. 1, 2 Jan. 2014, pp 79-87

Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures : Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham ; London, Duke University Press, 1996 pp. 266-282

Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp. 1964. London, UK, Penguin Books, 2018